Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

Why is usage-based pricing on the rise?

Let's dive into the trend of 2021

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Kyle Poyar
Nov 10, 2021
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👋 Hi, I’m Kyle and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on SaaS pricing, product-led growth, public company benchmarks, and much more.

Usage-based pricing is, frankly, trendy.

45% of SaaS companies now have some form of usage-based pricing (UBP), up from 34% last year, according to new data from OpenView’s State of Usage-Based Pricing Report (spoiler alert: I wrote it along with my colleague Sanjiv Kalevar).

The survey, it should be noted, used an expansive definition of usage-based pricing counting both companies with a largely usage-based or pay-as-you-go model along with companies that sell usage-based subscriptions.

Newcomers to usage-based pricing include startups like Cypress.io, Pulumi, and Algolia (which called it the ‘most customer-friendly pricing’ in the market); public companies like New Relic; and long-time incumbents like Autodesk.

Creative usage models can even be fo…

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